There was a thread of fire licking its way along my spine as we came back down from the high of the weekend alone. 

Realistically we both knew it couldn't last, but that was what made it so special to begin with. 

It was the last night before the others would begin showing back up to campus, and one or two players had already filed into the shared basketball house, I was laying on Kalen's lap reading while he threaded his fingers through my hair as he woke up from his impromptu afternoon nap. 

"Mmm, that feels so good."

His chuckle shook the small frame of the bed before he dug his fingernails even deeper into my scalp, my back arching of its own accord as some of the strands got stuck between his fingers and the pull was too enticing to ignore. 

"You like that, do you?"

"Maybe a little."

He tugged just a little bit harder and that was when I noticed that I hadn't read a single line of my book the entire time he'd been paying just a bit more attention to my hair. 

Abandoning the story altogether, I rose up from my spot on his lap to drape my arms around his neck instead, my legs going in between his as he gave me a little half smile, his eyes still droopy and tired from his nap. 

"If I'd known all it took was pulling your hair a little bit to get you to come here I'd have tried that a lot sooner."

"Please.  You were literally just passed out two minutes ago."

He rolled his eyes before threading his fingers through my hair again to keep me in place. 

"So?  I still would've wanted you to come here."

I was smiling when he pressed his lips to mine and sighed into the kiss, wondering just how it had happened that I'd become so comfortable with him. 

The real world was a sword handing over our heads, the danger and disaster looming with a clock ticking down to our demise, but it was like none of that mattered here, in his room, with our phones on chargers on the floor that we hadn't touched in hours. 

The rest of the world could wait. 

And wait, it did. 

His tongue prodded against my lips gently as I let him into my mouth, the kiss coaxing warm sighs from my throat while I rocked into him ever so slightly, tempted to see how far he'd let this go on. 

Every time previously, he would stop at just the moment of no return—when it wasn't enough to just have his lips on mine, but to have the entirety of his body enclose me in his warmth. 

He'd always stop it, though, and the disappointment had started to turn to feelings of rejection, even though I knew exactly why he'd done it. 

He'd told me, plain as day, the reason for him holding back, and it had nothing to do with the fact that he didn't want me. 

Quite the opposite, in fact. 

He was doing it in order to protect me from the emotional fallout—the kind of fallout that he'd given me the very first time we were together. 

It wasn't like I didn't already know what I was getting into—the pain from my first time and the duality of the immense pleasure he'd given me was enough to make my head spin when thinking back on it, but it wasn't like I didn't want to also try again...

I had been hesitant, at first, thinking about doing it again with him. 

Of course, I was scared. 

The morning after giving him my virginity, he'd basically turned into a different person and I'd discovered that he'd betrayed me for reasons unknown—well, until recently, that is. 

How could I trust that he wouldn't do that to me again?

He'd spent the entire week leading up to this lazy afternoon proving it to me, though. 

He'd been so open about his past, his pain.  His father...

There was a raw honestly in his words, and the trauma from his past was so etched with scars that it almost matched the intensity of my own. 

How could I not trust him, after everything he'd told me? 

He'd laid it out plain and bare, and I'd tried to do the same, telling him about my mother and how it felt to basically become my father's parent instead. 

Kalen brought me back to the present and out of my thoughts by nipping my bottom lip with his teeth just enough to let me know that he could sense my wandering thoughts and was wanting to bring me back to the present with him, to live in that moment where it was just him and me. 

Just Kalen and Gracie, tangled lips and teeth and tongues and limbs on his bed, alone, the light of the late afternoon shining bright as the sleepiness gave way to something hot and needy and desperate all at once. 

I arched into his touch, craving more, but terrified that he'd pull away again. 

Humming into his mouth, I pulled myself up on top of him, straddling his hips with my knees but keeping my chest close to his, throwing my head back as his lips kissed their way down the side of my neck.

He found a particularly sensitive spot just behind my ear that had me rolling my hips on top of him, the evidence of what that little move had done to him growing ever present as the moment wore on. 

I could only grin as he groaned into my neck when I did it again, only this time I made sure to press down even harder with my hips until I felt myself brush up against his ever growing, considerate length beneath me. 

"Something wrong?"

He could definitely hear the teasing in my voice because the next thing I knew, he was wrapping his hands around my waist and flipping us over, effectively cutting off any control I'd seemingly had over the situation. 

"What do you think you're doing there, Sweetheart?"

"What?  I thought you liked it."

He bent down to nip at my lip once more but this time I reached around to keep him there and sucked his lower lip into my mouth, reveling at the feel of his muscles twitching in response to my actions. 

His breathing was labored and his cheeks were becoming more flushed than they had already been after sleeping in a stuffy room for a few hours while I'd been draped all over him. 

"Keep doing that and this isn't going to be all we end up doing."

I grabbed one of his hands and decided to be more bold about where, exactly, I was wanting this to go. 

"Good." 

And then I guided his hand in between my legs. 

His sharp intake of breath rattled my chest as I looked up into his eyes, his pupils blown so wide I could barely see the navy blue of his irises. 

"Fuck, Gracie."

Pushing my hips up into him as best I could with his weight on me, he quickly righted himself by snatching both my hands and placing them above my head. 

"We've talked about this."

"Well, actually, you've talked about it and I listened.  Now I think it's time for you to do a little listening, too, okay?"

He didn't respond.  He only gazed back at me with an intense gleam in his eye as he attempted to control his breathing atop me, so I took that as my invitation to say what I needed. 

"You don't want this to be like the last time, then don't let it.  You don't want to ruin it like you did the morning after?  Don't betray me.  You've told me about your past, about your father, about everything.  I trust you, Kalen."

There were walls breaking down behind his eyes, walls that he'd put in place in order to keep me at a distance while we worked through this week together, to see what could become of it. 

And now I was knocking those walls down one by one with my words, and he was letting me. 

Slowly untangling my fingers from his, awed that he'd let me get a hand free, I pulled one up and traced the jagged lines of his stubbled cheekbones. 

"I might've been trying to ignore it, to just live in the moment this last week and forget about everything that's happened before this, but I can't.  Because I still love you Kalen and I'm tired of dancing around it like we can just pretend without all of the heavy shit, but we can't, and—"

"Say it again."

His voice was rugged, sharp on the edges and crashed against the silent room like waves on ocean rocks. 

"What?"

"Say it again, tell me you love me."

There was something so primal, so innate about the demand that I couldn't say no. 

"I love you, Kalen.  I do, and—"

He cut me off with a fierce kiss, something full of promise and fire and everything that I'd been craving this entire week without knowing that I'd been craving it. 

He was wicked and wild and everything in between—a devastating cyclone of vicious danger dressed up like a present ready for me to unwrap in my delirium and ecstasy. 

"You want me?  You have me, all of me.  Fuck, I love you so much Gracie.  You have no idea how much."

His words were almost unintelligible, pressed against my lips as he spoke, each word breathing life into the very heart of me. 

His heat was overwhelming, all encompassing, and I didn't dare move for fear I would extinguish it just as quickly as it had caught. 

Kalen's hands wandered everywhere on my body—catching the strands in my hair like before, wrapping around my neck, traveling down my neck to my chest, settling down somewhere below my hips where he could control the movement of them as I was becoming feverish with want for him. 

If there was one thing I had noticed about Kalen when it came to these things, it was that he loved being in control. 

That didn't mean he couldn't give up just a bit of it to me, however.  It was just his preference. 

Just like my preference was to be led somewhere, like a person dying of thirst being led to water. 

Kalen was an eternal oasis spring of sustenance, and I was dying for him to finally quench my thirst. 

His hand dipped below the shorts I'd borrowed from him, having to tie the drawstring extra tight as they hardly fit me, and he fiddled with the tie before finally shoving them haphazardly down my legs. 

I helped him out and pushed them the rest of the way down, tearing at his shirt as I went. 

Yanking my top up he palmed my breasts, exhaling exaltations as he went. 

"Fucking hell these are perfect."

Rolling a nipple between his forefinger and thumb, Kalen stared at me reverently, like he wasn't sure which part of me he wanted to worship first. 

I abandoned all faculties when he sucked one of the nubs into his mouth and grazed the sensitive skin of it with his teeth. 

All the while I was writhing beneath him, groaning, arching up into the air like I could get some kind of friction going in order to release the burning tension building up inside of me that I just couldn't seem to break. 

"Kalen..."

"Shh, sh, you're doing perfectly."

And then he kissed his way down my stomach, peeling my panties away as he went. 

"Tell me how this feels."

His mouth attached to the skin of my upper thigh and I jerked from the sensation, black dots appearing in my vision from my lack of oxygen with how quickly I was panting already. 

"G-good."

I could practically hear the smirk dripping from his lips. 

"Just good?"

His muscular arms bracketed my thighs between his head and all thoughts flew from my mind as he gave me one large, strong lick up my center and I practically screamed from how sensitive I'd been from the entire week of having been denied. 

"Yes!"

"Fuck, and here I was looking for something like 'great' or 'amazing', even."

How he could talk and form sentences or tease me in a moment like this was beyond me, but then he latched onto my clit with his lips and sucked, hard, and I was a goner. 

A fucking goner, pumping my hips up into his face and grabbing onto his hair and muttering and murmuring indiscernible words and curses until he got a specific kind of rhythm with his tongue that made everything go silent and explode in technicolor all at once, my entire body shaking from the force of it. 

"Now that, I believe, deserves a little more than just 'good', don't you think?"

"You are...unbelievable."

"Hm...I'll take it."

He raised himself up above me and lingered there while I lay panting and sweating and shaking, still tingling from the aftershocks of it all. 

He seemed content to just hold me afterwards as I reached down to try and undo the zip of his pants but his hands gently stopped me in my tracks. 

"But—"

"That was just for you.  I have more plans in store for you tonight, but I saw you earlier, you were ready to pass out while you were reading.  Let me just hold you for now, okay?"

There was such sincerity in the sweetness of his voice, like all he wanted to do was to take care of me, and it wasn't like I could say no to that.

Gathering me up in his arms after grabbing my panties from wherever he'd thrown them and helped me pull them back on, I sank into his chest and soaked up the warmth from the circle of his arms. 

He threw the blankets over us, and I was just starting to doze off when his fingers came to my hair and he smiled against my skin. 

"Say it again."

Groggily, I murmured the words into the air. 

"I love you."

His hold on me grew ever tighter as sleep took me completely. 

"I love you, Gracie."

***

Author's Note:

What did you think of this chapter?

What do you think will happen next?

What do you think will happen next?

The real world is coming back next week...what is going to happen to the sweet little bubble Gracie and Kalen have created for themselves?

Will Gracie forgive her friends?

Will they have to hide their relationship?

Stick around to find out ;)

Until next time my lovely readers,
Kristen :)